The Internet is rapidly becoming an important source of information and electronic communication for users of personal computers in homes and businesses. Much of the information on the Internet is available on a network called the World-Wide Web. The World-Wide Web is a collection of formatted hypertext pages located on numerous computers around the world that are logically connected by the Internet. Information from the World-Wide Web is displayed in the form of "web pages" which are accessed by user interface programs called "web browsers". Much of the information from the World-Wide Web is graphical in nature, and a typical web page can include text, graphic images, and animation sequences. Because of this graphic content, the proper display of such images on a monitor is fundamental to the utility of web pages. Until recently, access to the Internet and World-Wide Web from the home environment has been limited to users of networked computers. Recent advances in network technology, however, have enabled access to the Internet and the World-Wide Web through a standard television set as an alternative to the personal computer.
Because traditional web browsers are designed to display web pages on computer systems, their display capabilities are optimized for the display characteristics of standard computer monitors. Certain display characteristics of computer monitors however, differ from the characteristics of other types of display monitors. One such characteristic is the position and size of the active area on the display. Most computer monitors provide controls that allow the user to center the active area on the display screen. Some may even provide controls that allow the user to stretch the image horizontally or vertically to fill the screen and minimize the overscan area.
Overscan refers to the edges (or border) of the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) display. On a computer display, a blank or black overscan area serves to frame the active area and helps to indicate that the entire active area is displayed without any cutoff on the sides. Other types of display devices, such as televisions, however may provide very little user control over how much the active area extends into the overscan area. For example, most televisions are designed so that the picture fills the entire width and height of the screen. Because televisions are designed to receive and display broadcast signals which take into account the possible loss of content at the borders, the overscan does not pose a significant problem, and consequently very little content is usually lost at the edges of the picture. However, the display of graphic intensive web pages which contain content from one edge of the active area to the other may suffer if the image is not properly positioned in the center of the screen. Unfortunately many televisions do not offer controls which allow a user to center the image on the screen. In this case, it is possible that a web page displayed on such a television may lose some of its content because of cut-off from the sides.
One problem associated with prior art web browsers is that users are not provided a means of centering the image if the image appears off-center or is cut-off at an edge. This problem is not as acute when the display device is a computer monitor, since the use of well-established industry standards allows the production of video signals that are optimized for these monitors, and the monitors themselves typically contain adjustment mechanisms which allow the user to center the image. However, as televisions and other monitors are employed to display web pages, user control over display position from the web browser or computer application itself becomes increasingly important. It is therefore desirable to provide a web browser system which facilitates the centering of an image display within a display monitor. It is further desirable to provide a web browser system which stores a user specified display position once the user has positioned the image.